Japan Executes ‘Twitter Killer’ for 2017 Serial Murders

Shiraishi confessed to the killings and said he used Twitter — now known as X — to find and befriend people, mostly women between the ages of 15 and 26, who said online that they wanted to take their own lives.

He enticed them to his apartment near Tokyo with the promise of assisting their deaths, then killed and dismembered them. He kept body parts in coolers around his tiny flat, according to media reports.

The CrimesAnd The Punishment
Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki described Shiraishi’s crimes as “robbery, rape, murder, destruction and abandonment of corpses.”

He said all nine victims had been strangled, maimed and partially hidden in boxes, and some of the remains ended up in the garbage. Suzuki told a news conference in Tokyo, “I decided after much deliberation to execute.”

Shiraishi’s sentence was also not appealed, meaning the execution could be carried out under Japanese law. While the law calls for executions to take place within six months after a final verdict is handed down, the condemned often remain in solitary confinement for many years — even decades —waiting for their deaths to be carried out.

The psychological effects of this practice have long been condemned, particularly because prisoners are often told only a few hours before their execution that it will occur.

The Death Penalty in Japan and Public Opinion
Japan and the United States are the only two G7 countries that continue to carry out the death penalty. A government survey conducted in 2024 showed that the death penalty is considered “unavoidable” by 83 percent of those Japanese interviewed. The Justice Ministry said in December 2023 that 107 prisoners waited on death row.

Shiraishi’s case rekindled an international debate over Japan’s secretive and contentious death penalty system. His crimes were some of the most shocking in recent memory, prompting comparisons to previous attention-getting executions such as Tomohiro Kato in 2022 for the 2008 Akihabara stabbing spree, and in 2018, Shoko Asahara and 12 other cult members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult for the 1995 sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subway.